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AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#171

Post by lumost »

lolinder wrote: post #86
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

The problem with ChatGPT as a replacement for Google is that it was not designed to produce accurate facts, and it shows. This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes[0] for goodness sake! It's a language model, and a very impressive one at that, but language is used to express falsehoods and fiction just as regularly as it is used to express truth. This doesn't mean that it…

Google links are notoriously inaccurate. Google was always great at finding relevant/clickable links- they never tried to direct you to factual links.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#172

Post by TOMDM »

alar44 wrote: post #169
TOMDM wrote: post #44

Today I wanted to mute the bark on windows 11. Not knowing the terminology, Google was useless. I ask chatgpt and it tells me how to mute notifications, I clarify "no the thing where you're typing and windows can't do it so it plays a sound" and chatgpt happily informed me on how to mute the windows hard stop sound. For situations where you don't really know what you're looking for, chatgpt is already competitive wit…

Mute the bark? I've never heard this. Yeah GPT didn't know what draxxed and sclounsed means, but I wouldn't expect it to.

It's semi common language in the Linux world.

Here's someone using it on the mint forums

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=106218

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#173

Post by wizofaus »

asimjalis wrote: post #38

Eventually Chatbots will start inserting product placement ads as well. So comparing the ads on Google with the ad free ChatGPT experience is detracting from the real value of ChatGPT. Google results are mostly ok. But I have to do the synthesis. ChatGPT does the synthesis for me saving me time and mental bandwidth. This is the part that I find valuable.

If the chatbots were able to gauge your interests etc. well enough and provide information purely about products and services that it has good reason to believe you'd be genuinely interested in buying, I'd be happy for it to include such promotional material as part of the conversation (esp. if it was crafted in a way that's most likely to engage me - which would make it very different the majority of advertising I come across online and elsewhere).

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#174

Post by silisili »

n0tth3dro1ds wrote: post #4

I agree that chat bots aren’t the proper modality for replacing search. So what? Currently, Google search results stink. ChatGPT results are way better in a number of domains. Does it need to be a chat bot? No. But Google still stinks now. I’ll take anything that can just find the correct information.

I tend to agree for a lot of queries.

For example, I just got curious and asked Google how many oranges in a cup of juice. The main result is a conversion of a cup to cubic inches, for no reason. Scrolling down a bit, the first usable answer was a quora blurb.

ChatGPT told me it depends on the size and type of orange, but generally 2 to 4.

Guess which one I'll use next time?

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#175

Post by 22289d »

scarface74 wrote: post #162
22289d wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents Not yet. Today, ChatGPT is bad with facts. Don't rely on what it tells you. But that appears to be the future. And it sounds great.

In my specific specialty - AWS - I asked it a lot of questions like I would at an interview and it answered the questions well enough that I would have passed a candidate who gave me the same answers. I didn’t just ask definitions. I asked your standard compare and contrast, why would you use, is X and appropriate use of Y, etc. It can also write Python code, modify existing code based on plain English sentences and…

That's awesome, it does seem to be quite good at writing code. But in that case, you can test for it's weaknesses by asking it anything recent. The models are only trained on data through X date. Ask it something after X and it wont have the data to answer you correctly. Like about some new framework or feature.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#176

Post by alisonatwork »

lolinder wrote: post #106
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

devils advocate, but Google wasn’t designed to make sure the links it aggregates at the top are accurate/isn’t just blog spam designed to cater to specialized SEO tricks

I agree that Google is terrible at its job and produces garbage most of the time. That's the only reason why an LLM chatbot is seen by anyone as a viable replacement. But at the very least Google always gives you the source, which allows you to read it for yourself and judge its trustworthiness. No such option for ChatGPT.

I can't count the number of times I've clicked through to a link expecting to find more context than the excerpt on the search page and that content isn't there. Instead I get trapped in a sea of circular SEO spam that all promises to give me the answer I originally searched for but ends up leading me nowhere except to other article summaries with content I didn't even want to read about. Where's the source?

A good chunk of the remainder of the times I click through - especially on work-related stuff - it turns out the page is some kind of cribbed content from GitHub, StackOverflow and so forth, but mangled together and reskinned with different randomly-generated usernames making the "comments", so it seems like it's a different site, and you can only really tell by picking a specific sentence that appears unique and then manually searching for that same sentence on several different sites. No clear source there either.

Web search is broken, and it has been for several years now.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#178

Post by heavyset_go »

gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents

This is the "self-driving cars will obviously be better than human drivers given that they're trained on millions of humans' driving behavior" of chatbots.

In my experience, this is a huge stretch and wishful thinking.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#179

Post by alvah »

charcircuit wrote: post #119
Gigachad wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucks for things that can be monetised. Searching info on products for example. Just because SEO spammers are too good. text generators will make this problem so much worse because the spam will look exactly like the hand made content.

query: "apple watch" 1st result: https://www.apple.com/watch/ Google worked perfectly for me when I wanted to buy a product.

query: “best smart watch”

Pages and pages of SEO spam, generally ranked by how big & established the site pushing said spam is, rather than any unique insights contained within.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#180

Post by PeterisP »

userbinator wrote: post #34

They are not a replacement, but unfortunately search engines are turning into AI chatbots too. When I think of a search engine I want a "grep for the Internet", not an "AI". Looking up part numbers for ICs and other electronic components is the most prominent application where search engines like Google have gotten far worse in recent years, and AI ain't going to work there either.

Grep for the internet works if and only if the most appropriate page on the internet is actually good.

There are many questions for which the ChatGPT answer is more useful than the canonical documentation page I already have open in another tab, which includes a huge amount of extra information that is irrelevant for me (and thus requires effort to parse) and the key bits are scattered all over it; the chatbot can do the extraction and summarization work for me.

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